I think a variation on the multi community might be a good idea but implemented differently.

Community’s could opt into a meta community (somethings that are the same name arn’t the same thing).

Then on the user client side when you subscribe you can choose to subscribe to the meta community. When your feed is constructed it doesn’t include de-federated etc. when you post it is via your instance to the meta community and a shortcut is posted to all the meta community members, and replies go to your meta post in your instance.

As a former member of personal finance I never used the wikis.

It is exclusively dead and empty subs on my instance. Yet my instance has MANY very active communities… It is broken.

Funny in nearly all the subs I was in I only ever saw the wiki’s when on desktop and based on how many “trigger” bots subs had to answer common questions no one read the wiki’s anyway.

Votes will basically give away which communities you are using then.

I try to stick to just subscribed feed but there isn’t enough content, so I go to all and every day I see so many posts on the what is going on over at X… Lets focus on what is going on here / and content. If you really must chat about it there are whole communities on the topic.

I would argue normies follow people to new networks. People don’t go seeking out content on lemmy… If you google search stuff you end up with redit content hits not lemmy content hits for nearly every topic.

To move off Twitter, one person will potentially bring hundreds.

To move to Lemmy you need a bunch of people posting useful content…

Auto posting content without discussion also doesn’t seem to stick… I was looking at Lemmit which is mostly bots reposting reddit stuff and there is 0 discussion there.

Nether one is as popular.

However Mastodon is MUCH easier to use and has better pull as you follow people… If a person was on Twitter and moves to Mastodon you setup a Mastodon and follow them.

However for Lemmy, if you liked a specific subreddit and not everyone left you search for an equivalent and you find 6 plus (IF your instance is federated with a few even for the search to return results) then you try them out and find little interaction in some etc.

TL;DR following people is easier than creating communities that are active.

lemmy has a higher search hit for “Ian Fraser Kilmister” as it is a common name. Mastodon and Reddit are UNIQUE names. If you ask Google Assistant or Siri “What is lemmy?” you will get that result. Mastodoon has a better / more unique name.

I also just don’t personally like how it sounds, sounds too much like lemming or let me when I hear it out loud.

Mastodon is easier to deal with as regardless of which instance you sign up for you are just following other users or picking up on global trends. There is also ONE OFFICIAL mobile app out there to make getting started easy. You just find it in your app store.

Lemmy is a bit of a mess:

• Bad name (yes I kind of resisted due to this)
• Communities you only see your instances and ONLY other instances that users on your instance have subscribed to. This limits your discovery of new communities if you are self hosted or on a small instance.
• Duplicate communities all over for common words just on different Instances. Subscribe to your local one, most popular one, or all of them?
• Need to pick your instance around moderation, but your instance may defederate what ever it wants.
• Nothing related comes up if you search “lemmy” in the iOS app store at this time.

Not trying to nit pick but comparing the two, Mastodon has a few things going for it that make adoption much easier

undefined> Also, I’m suspicious that it’s not ‘spam bots’ in the traditional sense since what’s the point of making thousands of bots but then barely using them to spam anyone?

This is Twitter and web forum spam 101, you establish a bunch of accounts while there are very few controls, then you start burning them over time as you get maybe one shot to mass spam with each of them before they get banned.

O cool we are back early 2000 solutions to forum sign up bots…

Can’t wait for all the direct message spam to follow.

The more threads I read about both the federation issues (bad instances with bad rules) and lack of default user sign up validation controls. I really wonder if NONE of the design team have ever used web forums (phpBB, SMF etc) or managed an email server (default no encryption / trust, with TLS, SPF, DMARC layered on after the fact). These systems have been strugglingly with spam and bot controls for years and ZERO protection was mandated in the spec for this new open system.

Maybe something could be learned from how block chain systems (not specifically crypto) are build where there is federation but distributed cost and tracking of identity. IE identity is global not managed by an instance, and spamming has a cost. IIRC one of the new registration options ads some cost to the registration but it is still instance based.

I can understand the desire to be open, decentralized, and antonymous. However we still need a way to identify bot69 across the board and block them if they are a bad actor, and instances should have some form of trust built in even if it is other instances flagging them as trusted and that increases their trust or something.